It’s no longer in vogue. But the 1960s buzzword “information explosion” – referring to the rapid increase in the amount of published information and the great burden it places on individuals – is far from being obsoleted. In fact, it’s still quite relevant, not least in the maritime industry, which continues to be inundated by information of all types. How does one deal with the unceasing torrent, this rising flood?
The most obvious way also seems the most practical: limit your reading and Web browsing. This means getting or receiving only information that concerns the sector that you’re involved with. For those who are into Twitter and other forms of online social networking, choose which companies or persons to follow or link up with and which discussion groups to join. The idea of filtering makes sense, for no one has got enough time to take in everything. Trying to do so, in fact, is not only unnecessary but quite possibly hazardous to mental health.
That kind of strategy has its downside, however. Maritime professionals who confine themselves to their areas of specialisation tend to be bores who are fond of shoptalk and look dumb in the company of people who don’t have the same background as they. Such types often see the waves but not the ocean, preoccupied as they are with their own little corner of the maritime universe and little else. The upshot is parochialism of the sort that one finds in Manila’s maritime community.
Nothing could be more out of consonance with the nature of 21st-century shipping. Changes in the international regulatory framework are shrinking the industry into one global village like never before. Stricter ship emission standards, for instance, are bound to affect not only ship operators but a host of other players – ship designers, shipbuilders, shipboard equipment manufacturers, seafarers, manning agents, training organisations, and, not least of all, the P&I clubs.
Every new shipping regulation has a potential domino effect. So it obviously makes good business sense to know what’s going on if you’re one of the dominoes. As for ship officers, learning the business side of shipping should help prepare them for eventual onshore employment. Not all, though, would like to see it this way. Some invoke a parallel catchword from the 1960s: “information overload” – a term that suggests a kind of paralysis arising from the failure to manage an excess of information.
Strangely enough, we don’t know of anyone actually suffering from such an overload or even what the symptoms of it are. Intellectual underload, yes. What we do know is that some individuals couldn’t care less about being more informed of the things that ultimately matter to their business or profession. Whether it’s due to lack of time or plain laziness, this is a form of dying worse than any paralysis. ~Barista Uno
